Archive for the 'Iran' Tag Under 'Orange Punch' Category

We know politics is the "art" of give and take, but the report out of Israel about President Barack Obama's promise to that country is as blatant a political payoff as we've heard for a while. And it's behind closed doors, of course.

"WASHINGTON — The US offered to give Israel advanced weaponry — including bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes — in exchange for Israel's agreement not to attack Iranian nuclear sites, Israeli newspaper Maariv reported Thursday. . . Under the proposed deal, Israel would not attack Iran until 2013, after US elections in November this year. The newspaper cited unnamed Western diplomatic and intelligence sources."

How about that?

President Make-A-Deal has a principled objection to arming Israel with weapons to use against Iran unless the Israelis agree not to use them until after he is reelected.

But can you remember or find an instance in the history of the United States when voters changed presidents during a war?

Go ahead and look it up. No, LBJ and Vietnam didn't meet that test. He quit. He wasn't voted out.

With the stare-down contest currently under way to determine who is tougher being ratcheted up almost daily between the U.S. and Israel on one side and Tehran on the other, it's not inconceivable that fighting could well break out.

All it takes is one side misjudging the other to stumble into a shooting fest. Or some deliberate act.

International inspectors are reporting that Iran's nuclear program is running into some setbacks revolving around fluctuations in the centrifuges that are enriching uranium. Some attribute the problems to a computer worm called Stuxnet that was apparently designed to screw up the centrifuges and may just be doing so. Suspicion (or cheers) for developing and deploying the worm centers on Israel and the United States, with Israel widely considered the most likely. I happen to think so too. The U.S. is probably capable of developing such a worm but I kinda doubt that it would actually do so -- though working with Israel in the development phase is not out of the question.

My, my. After only 8 months of wrangling following an inconclusive election, Iraq may finally get an interim government of what they laughingly call national unity. The balance of power doesn't look all that different from what prevailed before the election. Current prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is likely to stay in that post and the somewhat ceremonial presidency will g0 to a Kurd, perhaps even the current prez, Jalal Talabini. Former PM Iyad Allawi, a secular Shia with Sujnni support emerged, with his Iraqiya party winning the most seats in parliament. They'll get parliamentary speaker, a new national security post, and maybe foreign minister.

Not that this is a final denouement. Few Iraqis are enchanted with Maliki or any of the major "leaders." And Iran's influence keeps growing, which is unlikely to be a stabilizing factor, but just might be if Iran sees a stable Iraq as being in its best interests. This government is still something of a make-believe central government (not as make-believe as Afghanistan's, but still), with little real control over most localities, which might not be such a bad thing.

A couple of scholars from the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow office have published a paper detailing ways Russia could be useful in curbing Iran's apparent nuclear ambitions. While acknowledging that Russia, despite military and business ties, doesn't have enough clout with Iran to dictate policy, and doesn't want to serve as an intermediary between Iran and the U.S., the two believe Russia could undertake some helpful actions. It can take the lead in discussions with Iran on nuclear proliferation and why it's a bad idea. They might be able to appeal to moderates and pragmatists in Iran, and they could be influential in holding off a military strike against Iran, which would have all kinds of destabilizing repercussions and would be unlikely to do more than delay the development of a weapon and perhaps cause the Iranians to redouble their efforts rather than give them up.

I don't know much about Alexey Malashenko, but I have read Dmitri Trenin's stuff from Moscow in the past and found him reasonably cogent and well-informed. However, I wouldn't be surprised if all the proposed policy actions the two recommend were undertaken and Iran was still not deterred. I'm still open to the possibility that Iran isn't as active in the search for a nuclear weapon as some maintain -- or that they're seeking technology advances that don't get them to weapons yet but lay the groundwork so it won't be all that complicated or time-consuming to produce weapons should the regime decide to do so at a later date. The opening of a power-generating nuclear plant, accompanied by claims that this proves the beleaguered Iranians aren't after nuclear weapons, is not exactly reassuring. How the U.S. deals with this is a difficult question I don't think anybody has come close to solving. Does this sound like an admission that I don't have a quick and easy answer to the Iranian conundrum? OK.

Thomas Sowell was recently featured on Ideas in Action with Jim Glassman, a public affairs show which airs nationally on PBS member stations and the Right Network. The launching off point for this discussion is Sowell's most recent book, Dismantling America, which delivers a stark warning about the direction the country is headed. Click here to watch or read the full interview.

As an antidote for the faster poison, Sowell supports direct military action by the United States and/or Israel. To the question of “will deterrence work”--the default position of Administration, Sowell says:

4:38 - “No. Because you can't deter suicidal people. You either stop them or you don't stop them.”

While it does seem true that more older buildings built before building codes were destroyed in Chile than more recent buildings, I think the reasons are more fundamental. Chile is a relatively prosperous country, in part historically but due to some extent to free-market practices put in place before Chile became a functioning democracy. It seems likely that wealth is a large factor in earthquake survivability. Due to many reasons rooted in its tragic history, Haiti has been misgoverned for centuries -- literally -- in ways that have prevented the emergence of a private-sector-based prosperity built on something other than political connections. Haiti could have had the strictest building codes in the universe, but people could not have afforded to build to code, so construction was almost universally shoddy. It might have been helpful if the U.S. had admitted more Haitian refugees -- who have by and large done reasonably well in the U.S. -- putting some pressure on the Haitian government to be more responsible so it would stop losing its best people. But there's no guarantee that would have worked out except perhaps over a long period of time.

This story about AccessNow, a group of volunteers who tried to help Iranians avoid censorship beginning during the protests last June following the rigged election, is fascinating and even a bit inspiring. 29-year-old Cameran Asheraf's parents emigrated from Iran but he feels solidarity with that country. In addition to offering techie advice and disseminating open-source software to activists in Iran, AccessNow has worked with Google and YouTube when Iranian protest videos were hacked. The group has ambitions to develop a global network and has shared experience with Tibetan, Burmese and Cuban dissidents.

The U.S. government has $50 million it would like to distribute to similar "garage" groups, but AccessNow has chosen not to take any government money. That strikes me as a wise decision. To be sure, the Iranian regime will probably accuse any US-based group in contact with pro-human rights activists as tools of the CIA, but taking government money would confirm it in the eyes of many Iranians. Better to have an arms-length relationship with the US government. The mistake the gobblement is making is assuming that if the government doesn't do it it won't get done, or that only a government can effectively undermine a foreign regime, which is hardly historically ratified. In fact, getting into subverting other regimes is a dubious government activity at best, one almost certain to lead to abuses (see the commies). Volunteer groups are almost always more effective.

It looks as if the regime largely contained the protests of the Green Movement yesterday through a combination of advance arrests, strategic deployment of police and other security forces, sometimes brutal treatment of protesters and targeted arrests and detainments of key leaders early in the day. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan attributes the regime's success in great part to the interruption of Internet services, given the reliance of dissidents on e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social networking. Marc Lynch with Foreign Policy magazine says "I fully believe that the Iranian regime is more unpopular and less legitimate than ever before -- but just don't see it as especially vulnerable at the moment." That leaves sanctions and negotiation.

Overt or covert US government support for the Greens w0uld probably undermine the movement more than help it. As I've suggested before, however, removing the People's Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin e-Khalq (PMOI/MEK) from the official US list of terrorist organizations -- it was put there in the 1990s during an effort to reach out to Iranian "moderates" -- would make the U.S. neutral, whereas keeping it on the list puts us effectively on the side of the regime.

Enduring America is live-blogging events in Iran, as is Iran News Now. Hard to get a full picture and early reports are almost always incomplete or incorrect. But it does seem as if the government was prepared with lots of troops to control the Green demonstrators and kept them somewhat confined. Some reports say the demonstrations weren't as large as the Ashoura protests in December. The government also bused in pro-regime demonstrators and gave them free food. Ahmadinejad's big "punch" seems to be declaring that Iran is now a "nuclear state" because it's enriching uranium to 20% U-235, but al-Jazeera disputes this. Andrew Sullivan has dozens of clips and some Twitter messages.

The regime has arrested several leaders and been pretty violent in trying to control protesters.